46 THE UNIVERSE. 



magnifying power. They are met with in all kinds of 

 animal and vegetable steepings, and then- number is often 

 so prodigious, that they all seem to touch each other in 

 the drop of hquid in which they move ; it is astonishmg to 

 see that they do not stifle one another. A single drop 

 sometimes contains more of them than there are inhabitants 

 on the globe. 



25. Monads. 



These animalcules are sometimes punctiform, and show 

 no internal organization ; but in some of them Ehrenberg, 

 the true prince of microscopists, remarked that there are 

 multiple stomachs like little elongated sacks, opening into 

 a common mouth. In others a long movable filament is 

 seen. 



We need not remark here that these animalcules, which 

 are complex creatures, have no connection with the imper- 

 ceptible monads that played so great a pai't in philosophy 

 from Epicurus down to Leibnitz, and which the latter, in 

 his Monaclology , defined as a simple substance which has 



of planets and of all the living creatures on them was due to the fortuitous 

 concourse of atoms. 



Lenoippus, and even more, Epicurus, Ijrought this system into vogue. Though 

 defended by Kepler, Descartes, and Gassendi, modern science has completely 

 overthrown it. 



